The Other Mother
by gibbousmoons
Summary: There are two sides of every family tree, and most Heterodynes weren't as stable as Bill and Barry in any case. Agatha has a screw loose- just a little one.


The Chapel of Bone was a magnificent room, gilded with gold and plated with silver, carpeted with ivory, the pews fossilized wood. Everything inside it was wanted, coveted, but that was why she was here, wasn't it?"

Agatha's footsteps were loud, her hard leather boots impacting on the hard floor with little taps. On her shoulder a little round clank peered anxiously around. "Hello?" She called out, half hoping not to hear and answering voice. "I was told that you were the part of the Castle that could help me."

She'd almost convinced herself that nothing was going to respond when a sinuous white and brass shape dropped out of the dark above the altar. It was as wide as she was tall, and so long that she couldn't see the end of it. Two strong claw-tipped arms hung down from where the clank had its first joint.

The massive body of the Castle Heterodyne's largest mental fragment leered down at the girl who had reached its most sacred chamber, fanged maw twisted into a savage grin. "There have been other times when my masters have gone missing. You are not the first who has come claiming the family name, and you will not be the last. Some brought armies to my gates, some arrived as you did, in disguise and pursued by their enemies. All claimed to be of the blood. All found their way here, to be tested."

It lowered itself, pressing against the carpet of human skulls, and tapped at a gap where the chapel's original stone floor showed. "Sometimes they were delusional, sometimes they were . . . meat puppets dancing tunes, and sometimes they were simply, honestly . . . wrong."

The skulls shifted under Agatha's feet as she stepped forwards. "None of them ever left." She said with a grimace. The bones were at least picked clean of the messier kinds of residue, but she didn't want to slip and rub her face against the others. "You don't like imposters much, I suppose."

"_No_." The Castle hissed. "And now it is your turn- false Heterodyne, to join them."

"That would be a reasonable hypothesis, if you weren't missing one, vital, piece of data."

"Don't think you can outsmart me!" You will submit your claim, and then I will kill you." The mechanical intelligence snapped its teeth for emphasis, but then descends into a bone-rattling, purring tone. "But since you have been so _helpful_ on your way here, I suppose I can spare you a few minutes. The beetles enjoy their meet with that little extra something fear adds and the past few claimants dies too quickly to give it to them. I feel vaguely guilty about it, so you may as well speak up."

Agatha closes her eyes and exhales. "I'm not a claimant."

"what"

"My name is Agatha Mongfish, and I came here because I don't have anywhere else where I'll be safe." She said with an air of finality. The ground shook when she says her name, and the Castle's body swung in close, looming over her with its white facing and pressing its great mechanical hands down on the floor. Skulls scraped against skulls, and some popped or shattered under the strain of its bulk.

It tapped its fingers one by one, drumming a percussive rhythm that Agatha found almost familiar, before slowly bringing its gaze up and down her oil-stained clothes and ragged hair, once groomed in Paris fashions and now groomed much more simply.

"Mongfish, but not a Heterodyne? That _is_ a first. You even bare a certain, unfortunate, resemblance to the late Master's wife." Its mouth opened wide in a smile that bared far too many teeth to be friendly. "Perhaps you should entertain me with your story, miss . . . _Mongfish_."

Agatha coughed. "It started at University- no, when Tarvek brought me to Paris with him."

"The beginning." The Castle commanded sternly. "You can't perform the experiment until you have the reagents on hand. Start with your school, girl. Where were you educated, and by whom?"

"Transylvania Polygnostic University under Doctor Beetle. I was there for a year before the Doctor had a visitor. I didn't know who he was at the time, but when I brought them tea I saw the schematics for the device they were repairing and, well." The Spark blushed and tapped her fingers together, grinning sheepishly. "I threw a bit of a fit."

Mister Tock lay on his side, smoke billowing from the ruptures in his casing. Revenants screeched savagely as they shambled through the streets en masse. The students were firing out at mobs of monsters though the windows on the upper stories and, of course, Beetleburg was on **fire**.

_Earlier, but not by much . . . _

Doctor Tarsus Beetle scurried through the corridor, his visitor trailing behind on longer legs. Both men wore greatcoats, though the difference in their heights meant that one was by necessity much greater than the other. "I'm telling you, Tarvek, I'm too old-fashioned to work with Van Rijn's work, too set in my ways. I'd ruin it"

Tarvek Sturmvoraus smiled politely, but his posture was stiff despite his best efforts. It was quite a journey from Paris to Beetleburg. Romania wasn't the closest country to France, even by the prince's private airship. "I'm sure you'd get back in the swing of things quickly, if you set your mind to it. This could be your break, a way to get back in the game after teaching mediocre students for so long!" He pontificated, skipping ahead of the smaller man on nimble feet. "I would owe you, of course."

_That_ gave Beetle pause, but his pace only slowed for a moment. The chance to have the heir to Sturmhalten, and all that came with it, in his debt was a tempting offer. But he shook his head and continued on. "No. No Tarvek, I cannot leave my university and my town, not even for a Muse and a favor."

"And I cannot simply abandon my place at the University of Paris. We both have something the other wants- Don't you want to be the man who repaired a Rembrant Van Rijn, one of the Muses?" The young man's voice took on a pleading tone for a phrase.

Having reached the door at the end of the hall, Beetle stopped, his hand on the knob. It was shaped as an oval divided into three sections by two lines, in the image of a beetle. "Don't beg." He chided absently. "Not one of my students has ever begged me for anything. Now I invited you here for a reason."

"I was starting to think you'd done so to _waste my time_." He ground out.

"Not one of my students ever has ever gone into a fit next to an **operating room **before!" Beetle thundered back. "But if you'll step inside the theater and take a look. . . I think you might see something interesting."

The door opened silently, gliding on well-oiled hinges. A row of heads was visible just above the top of the private box's walls.

Beetle entered, and after a moment Tarvek followed. There was only one chair, and the Master of Beetleburg was in it, so he stood instead. It afforded a better view in any case, he reasoned, then swept his gaze over the crowd gathered around the well-lit area at the bottom of the operating theater.

"Tell me when you see it." Beetle instructed cryptically, but Tarvek was used to understanding mysteries and unraveling lost secrets, no matter how long ago they were created. In his own (modest) opinion his was the keenest mind in all of Europa. One day he'd understand how to fix the Must he'd broken, but for now he had a lesser mystery on his hands. His father's letter had described Doctor Beetle as being extraordinarily straightforward and honest, so whatever he was meant to notice in this room, it must be very important.

The most obvious place to look was inside the operating room itself, through the roof. A strawberry blond of average build, her long hair pulled back with a tie, stood over the operating slab. A man lay on it with his eyes closed. He could be either dead or sedated, but Tarvek thought that sedation was most likely, given Beetle's fondness of killing via suffocation in the town square. The girl was hunched over the subject though, so he couldn't tell either her age or the state of her patient very well.

She seemed to know what she was doing, at least. There wasn't much blood on the slab at all!

Adequate surgeons aside, there simply wasn't much going on in the room at all. He glanced through the faces in the crowd, and for a minute he thought that Theo was there, but no. He was still on Castle Wulfenbach with Tarvek's other old friends.

The onlooking crowd was even less interesting. A scowling man with close-cut white hair, standing next to another, both bearing the marks of Beetle's personal assistants. Perhaps that was what he was meant to see? "I can't see anything."

"Of course not, she hasn't turned around yet." Beetle gloated, and Tarvek shifted in his seat. There was _something_ odd in the room, an energy, a feeling in the atmosphere whose source he couldn't pin down.

"So it _is_ the girl, then."

Just then, she moved to the other side of the table, slipping around it deceptively quickly despite the long green dress she wore under the operating smock. Gold gleamed at her throat, but Tarvek didn't notice that when compared to her face.

It wasn't that she had an exceptionally pretty one- the prince was used to pretty faces, pretty people with vapid expressions and empty eyes. For all the talk of ideas and innovation, Paris was a magnet for parasites whose only skills were being decorative and easily hoodwinked into the role of the common distressed damsel.

Her face was nearly a mirror for the portrait his father had hung in so many places.

The girl in the operating theater was nearly a mirror match for Lucrezia Mongfish.

She set the scalpel down and stepped back, and it was like a transformation had come over her, like the man with the elixir he'd heard stories about in the seedier parts of the University of Paris. She was the same girl, physically. You could dissect her and the girl of moments before and they'd be more of an exact match than freshly decanted clones, and yet there was a difference.

"Quite a metamorphosis, isn't it?" Beetle asked as he leaned forward and gave the girl in the pit an approving wave and smile. The crowd took that as its cue and burst into polite applause, and the girl lit up in response. "Her name- is Agatha Clay, and I believe that she can help you with your problem better than I."

The old professor stroked his broach. "I've taught a lot of people. Klaus, Lucrezia, Serpentina, Demonica, Bill, Barry . . ." He stared down, a peculiar expression on his face. "I've made my fair share of promises."

Tarvek held what he wanted to say. Outside the box, the room was loud with conversation and moving bodies, but inside it tension had grown. Every political bone in his body urged him to let the aged professor get this off his chest.

"I made a promise not to tell anyone, but I also made a promise to keep her safe, even from the Baron." Beetle revealed, slowly sitting back down in his chair and steepling his hands, not meeting the young man's questioning gaze but instead still looking down into the operating theater, though Agatha Clay had already left. "You **recognized** her."

"She's Lucrezia's daughter, isn't she?"

"I suppose that's a delicate way of putting it, but yes." Beetle shrugged, and pulled a flask out of his coat. Taking a sip, he added, "I despise doubletalk, but with a situation this delicate I suppose I'll rely on your nose for politics over my own. I have . . . a source, a very trustworthy source that came to me nearly a decade ago with important news _about The Other_."

Tarvek froze. His mind raced, leaping along plots and possibilities, trying to trace who Beetle's informant could be, _what_ he could know, how much would be safe to reveal that he knew the other man knew-

"From your reaction, you know too. I'm not threatening you." The old man interrupted his thoughts with a gentle voice, and held the metal flask out in offering. It was waved away. "But a jeager rode into the city today. I cannot allow Klause to know about miss Clay. I made a promise to keep her safe, even from him! And I think that you can keep her safe."

". . . I see. She _would_ be useful. Has she broken through yet?"

"No, but she _is_ a Spark."

"A Spark without a breakthrough?" He frowned. "That's irregular."

"So were her parents."

Taken off guard, Tarvek snorted. "Say that I agree. I'd love to have one of your students help me with my work, but there has to be a catch."

Doctor Beetle grinned widely, honestly, and more than a little madly. "Just her parents, but don't worry. They'll _like_ you."


End file.
